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"Laugh The War Out" – This is an interesting finding by proffesor Youji Kimura of Japan that laughter is not only the best medicine, but an effective weapon to stop the wars.

 The only problem is finding a way to measure it. And so the expert on communications has invented a machine to chart out laughter - and a new unit of 'aH' to calculate it.

“We have found that children laugh more freely, releasing 10 aH per second, which is about twice as much as an adult,” Mr Kimura, a professor at Kansai University in the western city of Osaka, told reporters.

Kansai University (Kansai daigaku), or Kandai, is a private non-sectarian and coeducational university located in Suita, Osaka, Japan and in two other locations: Osaka City; and Takatsuki, Osaka.

“Adults tend to calculate whether it's appropriate to laugh and under those restraints they eventually forget how,” he said.

“Laughing is like a restart function on a computer. Laughing freely is very important in the course of human evolution,” he said.

Mr Kimura, who believes in 'a shift from a century of wars to a century of humour and tolerance,' has studied the science of laughter for decades in Osaka, the hub of Japan's stand-up comedy scene.

In his theory, human laughter is produced in four successive emotional stages - letting loose, then deviating from the norm, followed by freely laughing and then having the laughter overflow.

 “I believe there is a circuit in the human brain that creates laughter through these steps to the stage of overflowing,” Mr Kimura said confidently.

“Understanding this mechanism is the door to resolving one secret of human beings.”

To measure laughter, he attaches sensors on the skin of a tested subject's stomach, particularly the diaphragm, and detects muscle movements.

The machine looks 3,000 times a second at electric elements normally produced in the body.

“I have a theory that humour detected in the brain gets directly discharged through the movement of diaphragm,” he said.

By checking the movement of the diaphragm and other parts of the body, it will be possible to see if a person is only pretending to laugh while also distinguishing different types of laughter such as derision and cynicism, Mr Kimura said.

Mr Kimura wants to make the measuring device as small as a mobile phone and possibly market it as a health and amusement gadget.

Mr Kimura said he planned to present his findings this summer to the US-based International Society for Humor Studies^[1], adding that he looked forward to looking at differences in laughter internationally.

NOTES: 1) The International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) is a scholarly and professional organization dedicated to the advancement of humor research. Many of the Society's members are university and college professors in the Arts and Humanities, Biological and Social Sciences, and Education. The Society also includes professionals in the fields of counseling, management, nursing, journalism, and theater. All of our members are interested in humor's many facets, including its role in business, entertainment, and health care as well as how humor varies according to culture, age, gender, purpose, and context.

As part of their activities, they publish a quarterly journal and newsletter and hold an annual international conference. The 2007 ISHS Conference was held in Newport, Rhode Island and the 2008 Conference will be held at the University of Alcala outside of Madrid, Spain.